A Measure of Quiet Rapture - The Taste: Part II

For somebody who has been to the Taste enough times in my life that I was indifferent to going this year, I certainly didn't expect to go three times! I do feel that it is over-rated and overpriced, but the convenience of having 60 restaurants conglomerated in one spot, free entertainment and plenty of people to be surrounded by (if you're a people person) is too enticing. I also didn't find the first day of attendance satisfying, and since I had the money, I wanted to get more out of the experience. I hadn't planned on going again, but I came home yesterday from interviewing the community builder for the condo to find a message from a friend stating that he had been dismissed from work early, and was ready to go to the taste. Rarely do I turn down invitations for food, unless it's not worth the effort, so I gave in. My friend is low vision and he can only see out of one eye, so he had trouble reading the map. Thanks to information I had given him before, he was able to obtain a large print map in the past, so he went searching it out again this year. Not only did they have all materials available in large print, but I was able to obtain a copy of the complete Taste brochure in Braille. While I initially didn't think this would be helpful in navigating the booths, I was pleased to discover that all of the vendors were listed, along with the items they sold. This made it much easier to make sure I got to try the things I wanted. My friend reads incredibly slow, so we ended up making a great team. I'm always impressed when ALL of the materials at an event are made available in accessible formats in a timely fashion, because that is an extremely rare occurrence, and often the materials don't turn out to be very useful. In this instance, I referred to the brochure heavily, so props to the City of Chicago MOPD Office for doing the socially responsible thing and incurring the expense of producing all that material, although I'm sure it was in very low demand.

Since everybody else is doing it, I'll drop a list of the items I consumed over the last two days:

• BBQ beef pizza strudel from Pompei


• Saganaki from Atrium


• Hot and spicy onion rings (that weren't so hot or spicy) from Fireplace Inn


• Orange chicken, fried rice and vegetable tempura from Guey Lon


• Blue raspberry and mango Italian ice from Mazzone's

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: WGN Radio